


Paper Airplanes

by SassSexandSmut



Series: Laws of Motion [2]
Category: NCIS, The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: F/F, sort of canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 15:09:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13250826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SassSexandSmut/pseuds/SassSexandSmut
Summary: She hears about Jenny's death in the daily paper, a magnificent woman shredded callously like a paper airplane. It hits her harder than she thought it would.





	Paper Airplanes

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance. I was all set up to write a happy ending, but apparently my muse wasn't having it. Consider this one of two endings—in this one, Jenny is dead. One day, I'll write a second ending to Laws of Motion with a very different tone. You can choose which one is your canon, but regardless I threw NCIS canon out the window years ago.

She reads it in the daily paper— _NCIS Director Jennifer Shepard dead—_ and for a moment feels insulted that no one called her earlier. No one _could_ call her about it, of course. She preferred it that way. Stella understood privacy better than anyone, and she would hate for their liaisons to be Jenny’s downfall from such a delicate position. She didn’t _agree_ with how institutions politicized their employees’ sex lives, but she was painfully familiar with it. First and foremost, she and Jenny were their jobs. Jenny was her job even before she was herself.

 

The waitress glides over to her booth, asks if she wants the usual—black coffee, sugar on the side. Stella presses her lips together and wills herself to speak. She orders an Irish coffee but really just wants a shot of whiskey. Maybe two. Maybe five. If the waitress is concerned she doesn’t show it. She’s a nice girl, maybe nineteen, gazes at Stella every Sunday morning with quiet curiosity. They don’t know each other’s names, and that’s how they prefer it—strangers exchanging kind words.

 

“It’s a shame,” the young waitress says, clunking her coffee on the table. Her brown eyes gesture to the newspaper headline. “That woman was a fucking legend.”

 

Stella raises one eyebrow. She meets the girl’s eyes. “Was she?” She can’t stop the twitch in her lip, the click of her heel against the diner’s hardwood floor.

 

The girl shrugs. “I read about her this morning too. I mean she isn’t a celebrity icon or that kind of legend, but she did some amazing things.” A pause. “They said it was a house fire.”

 

“Bullshit.” Stella snaps the paper shut and drops it on the table. “She wouldn’t have been that callous.”

 

_They have sex in the sitting room of Jenny’s Georgetown home, with a pistol lying on the coffee table. She scoops up the paperwork they disturbed and shuffles it back into a neat stack before she tucks her head between Stella’s thighs. When they go to bed, Jenny checks twice that her toaster, coffee brewer, and floor lamps are unplugged. She climbs into bed naked and slides her Glock beneath her pillow._

 

The waitress flinches slightly, narrows soft eyes at Stella, and her mouth drops open for a moment. She closes it, but her eyes are still wide as saucers. “You think she was murdered?”

 

“Assassinated,” Stella corrects, sipping her coffee, “but yes.”

 

She nods shakily and walks away, and Stella finishes her shot of coffee and whiskey in a single gulp. A pang of guilt strikes her, whether for speaking so sharply or too openly she can’t decide. Jenny had always been secret—not private in the way Stella was, but secret. She couldn’t disclose half of what her job entailed for security risks; she was cautious to the point of paranoid; she appeared and vanished from Stella’s life over and over again without warning. She was a spy at heart, and Stella had found that thrilling. It hadn’t bothered her because Stella preferred the intimacy of silence to the exchange of secrets, and this way she’d never had to say much about herself.

 

_“I have to catch a plane early tomorrow,” Jenny mumbles hoarsely, her cheek smushed into the pillow._

_Stella rolls over in bed to face her. “What time?”_

_“Six am.”_

_“I’ll drive you,” she says without hesitation._

_“Are you sure?”_

_Stella nods. “I wake up early anyway.”_

_She doesn’t ask where Jenny is going. Part of her imagines Jenny as a grim-faced James Bond; another part of her sees the woman who kills James Bond—someone had to; he was always a liability). She’s not sure which side she’s attracted to and which side unnerves her a little bit. Perhaps it’s the attraction itself that’s so intimidating, but Jenny is the first person she’s ever slept with who unnerved her. Jenny is also the first person she’s slept with more than once in near twenty years._

 

When the waitress comes back, she’s carrying another Irish coffee and a shot of straight whiskey. “You look like you need it,” she says with an apologetic half-shrug.

 

“Thanks,” Stella mumbles. She wonders what exactly in her appearance suggested she needed more alcohol. She was spotless when she walked into the joint this morning, dagger-sharp heels clipping the tile floor, but she feels utterly unraveled. As if someone pulled every thread loose from her shirt, then combed her hair backwards. When she picks up the coffee, her hand trembles.

 

The waitress just stands there, wringing her hands together and watching Stella drink with anxious eyes. She catches Stella’s stare, curly brown hair obscuring her face. Her foot scuffs the ground.

 

Stella cocks one eyebrow. “Yes?” she says, and it sounds rougher than she intended. “Don’t be afraid to speak your mind,” she adds, “whatever that may be.”

 

The girl seems to relax a bit. “Did you know that woman? The Director of NCIS, or whoever she was?”

 

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Stella almost allows a half-smile to cross her face. She’s flattered someone assumes she knew Jenny. She didn’t, not really, or so she tells herself—she has no business being utterly distraught. They slept together three, maybe four times. Of each others’ lives, they knew intimate details with no context. She knew Jenny’s scars, the reminders of her trials and every story behind them, but she’d be damned if she knew Jenny’s favorite color, or where she grew up.

 

“You talk about her like you knew her. How she’d never be so callous.”

 

Stella sighs. “I met her a few times. She’s intense, smart, has a retort for everything.” She pauses for a moment before confessing, “I wish I’d known her better.”

 

_“Total strangers are the only people you can really be honest with, because you’ll never see them again. It doesn’t matter if you fuck up, because there’s no relationship to destroy.” Jenny chuckles darkly. “Maybe not with the details of my job, but the personal side of things.”_

_It’s too true. She flashes back to every stranger who spends a night in her bed. Every stranger who knows the intimate details of her body and nothing else. She wonders if Jenny counts as total stranger anymore._

 

“What’s your name?”

 

The question takes her by surprise. The anonymity between them is comforting for her, and she always assumed it was comfortable for this girl as well. She’s a student; her life is casually and quietly uprooted the way lives are at age nineteen. Stella is only a constancy day-to-day, a friendly stranger.

 

“Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson,” she says at last. The world is filled with friendly strangers. It’s short on friends. “Just Stella.”

 

“I’m Charlotte.”

 

Stella cracks a wan smile. “Good morning, Charlotte.” She takes a tiny sip from the cup of whiskey on the table. Perhaps Jenny Shepard’s death inspired Charlotte to have a real conversation with the woman in the Met uniform who turned up every morning for coffee. Perhaps Jenny Shepard’s life inspired the woman in the Met uniform to respond.

 

_Jenny undoes the buttons on her uniform one by one. She’s not inclined to tear them open, rush the evening. Stella pushes their glasses of wine across the coffee table with one hand, with her foot shoves Jenny’s tiny suitcase away from the couch. They’ve been here all of an hour. They used to travel for work, stay in hotels and have wild sex on sheets owned by a stranger. One day, familiarity kicked in; now when Jenny comes to London she stays in Stella’s flat and knows which drawer holds the silverware._

_She drapes her coat over the couch as Jenny unclasps the lingerie behind her back. Their lips are so close they can smell the bottle of wine they shared minutes before. There’s something uncomfortably intimate about being freed of a uniform. The same intimate as knowing where someone stores their silverware, touching their hair, kissing them chastely as they walk in the door._

 

Charlotte disappears into the kitchen, and Stella takes a deep breath, closing her eyes and sinking into the booth. Her phone buzzes on the table. The number is American, and for a second Stella thinks it’s Jenny, flying in on a moment’s notice and asking for a ride. Then the newspaper catches her eye.

 

“Gibson.”

 

_“My name is Ziva David, and I work for NCIS. Tell me why your number is in our dead director’s phone.”_

 

Well, that’s one way to begin a conversation.

 

“Jenny was a friend of mine.”

 

 _“First name basis,”_ comes the cool reply, and Stella winces internally. She wants to maintain her privacy, but she also wants to demand answers from these people on the grounds of her relationship with Jenny—friendly strangers, friends, overseas acquaintances phone-fucking at three AM after gut-wrenching cases.

 

“May I ask what happened to her?”

 

_“House fire. Who are you?”_

 

“Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson. Why would you call me unless you were investigating Jenny’s death?”

 

 _“You’re Stella.”_ It’s forward, matter-of-fact. She wonders what her name means to Ziva David, to Jenny when she said it aloud. She’s surprised Jenny spoke her name to anyone at all. She can’t decide if it’s a pleasant sort of surprise.

 

“Yes, I’m Stella,” she replies, wondering what that’ll get her into.

 

 _“She died in a shootout in an abandoned diner in the desert.”_ This time the voice is tinged with a little bit of sympathy, and Stella swallows the feeling that she’s being pitied.

 

Silence.

 

_“She took down the four men who attacked her.”_

 

So Jenny died like a movie cowboy—good, bad, and ugly all in one heart, and the sand swallowed her bones. That doesn’t make Stella feel better. It’s shame, she muses, that the desert is ugly, empty, not a place you’d like to look your last. It’s a shame four men with firearms wasted a woman like a paper airplane.

 

She glances at the quaint establishment around her and catches Charlotte bringing scrambled eggs to an elderly couple. “Thanks,” she says into the phone, setting it on the table. Charlotte catches her eye and offers her a smile. She ought to get to know Charlotte a little better.

 

Her phone buzzes again, and this time she hesitates before picking it up. The Call ID reads a line from the Met. She breathes a sigh of relief—she’s not sure what she was expecting, maybe another call from NCIS, maybe Jenny’s husky voice she always imagined was a little bit immortal. An entity that manifested in long distance phone calls and never truly disappeared. Shaking her head at such wishful thinking, she picks up the phone.

 

“Gibson.”

 

_“Another woman is dead. We think it’s the same killer as all the others.”_

 

Violent misogyny, learned rage, aimless revenge against the inevitably unfair world. “Serial offender,” slips off her tongue. Men wasting women like paper airplanes.

 

“ _We’re sending a car for you, ma’am.”_ He doesn’t have to ask where.

 

“Thank you.” She hangs up and sets her cell phone on the table.


End file.
